Life is Good: Postcard from Nova Scotia

Friday, September 25

This comes to you from Lincolnshire (Chicago area), home of Mary's brother Dick, where we are enjoying a brief layover on our flight home from Nova Scotia. Although those of you on Facebook will already have seen the photos from White Head Island, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, for us, this trip was not about dramatic coastlines and picturesque fishing villages.

Our trips often develop in unanticipated theme. Largely because we were listening to Mary Doria Russell's books "Doc" and "Epitaph," our spring van ramble through Oregon and northern California acquired an 1870's focus.

This trip turned out to be about migration, and its corollaries immigration and deportation. We absorbed the 1755 deportation of the Acadians (many migrated to Louisiana where they developed what we know as Cajun culture), the immigration of the New England Planters who replaced them, the immigration of the Scottish highlanders, the British Loyalists (including Black Loyalists), and finally, the millions of soon-to-be Canadians who flowed through Halifax's Pier 21 during the 20th century. Our understanding was informed by this trip's audiobook, Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration."

We don't learn much about Canada in U.S. schools, and historic sites don't always give the big picture. Until we visited the Fortress of Louisbourg, it was a blur of French in charge, then British, then French, then British. At Louisbourg, in the course of a one-hour walking tour of the 1740's fortress (at that time, the largest fortification in North America, defending the third busiest port on the Atlantic coast), we were finally able to put it all in the context of vaguely familiar European century of imperialist conflict between England, France and Spain, that included the French and Indian Wars, the War of Spanish Succession, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812. Not unlike today's Syrians, the peoples living in Nova Scotia and on Cape Breton, from the Mi'kmaq on, were displaced by these wars, with often disastrous results.

It wasn't all history. We had two wonderful visits with friends- John & Brenda Blom on White Head Island (New Brunswick) and Bob & Janice Girard at Lake Annis (near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia). There's something particularly invigorating about days of intense hanging-out with folks who like good conversation, food and drink.

Speaking of food, we ate amazing amounts of very fresh seafood, particularly haddock and scallops, but also mussels, cod, tuna, halibut, and bits of lobster and crab served in endlessly appetizing ways. Most unusual were the lobster pirogues served as part of our five-course tasting menu at the The Bite House, just outside Baddeck.

In addition to food, we sampled local wines, beers, and single malt whiskey, enjoyed Cape Breton music from ceilidhs (a "kay lee" is a sort of Scottish music jam) to Men of the Deeps, North America's only coal miners chorus. Although Mary did see a few new-to-her birds, we were too late for fall migration (and too early for fall colors). Oh yeah, we rode on a LOT of ferries, on rides varying in length from five minutes to 2 1/2 hours. We were, after all, in the Maritime Provinces.

On our last full day in Nova Scotia, at Pier 21 (Canada's Immigration Museum), the Family History Center provided printouts of my parents' immigration records from 1939 (Papa) and January 1940 (Mama), as well as information about the ships they came in on- the Georgic (Mama) and the Ils de France (Papa). For me, a moving conclusion to a visit during which we talked so much about the migration of people from one place to another.

Home tomorrow. Still lots to ponder.

Toni

Pictures- (1) Getting ready for lobster season on White Head Island, (2) John and Mary at Southwest Head, Grand Manan, (3) the beach at Kejimkujik Seaside, (4) Bob & Mary, followed by Janice and Bob's sister Phyllis on Mavillette Beach (French Shore near Yarmouth), (5) the Lunenburg Academy, (6) little toad at Uisge Bahn Falls near Baddeck, (7) view south towards Cheticamp, (8) another coastal shot, this time along the Lighthouse Trail outside Louisbourg, (9) the Skyline Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, (10) sunset from our B&B in Cheticamp, (11) the beach at Inverness, (12) the White Head Ferry from John & Brenda's deck, (13) a carnivorous pitcher plant at Keji Seaside, (14) harbor seals at Keji